PANTEX: Pollution in the Panhandle

The Texas
Toxic Tour stops this week in the Texas Panhandle--home to
the nation's nuclear weapons disassembly and temporary plutonium storage
facility. This is the story of Doris and Phil Smith, farmers living
next to the plant, whose well water may soon be contaminated with the
creeping plume of contaminants emanating from the plant. Watch the
video interview with the Smiths to hear a moving and informative
firsthand account of their fight against not only the weapons plant, but
also against the Texas Natural
Resource Conservation Commission. "A farmer spends his entire life
propagating life," muses Phil Smith in the video, "and right across the
road we're combating a facility that has no other means than death."

Nukes in North Texas

Just 17 miles north of Amarillo sits the Pantex Nuclear
Weapons Plant, a Department of Defense facility which formerly assembled
nuclear weapons now dismantles old ones and maintains newer ones.
"Pantex is scheduled to store in excess of 20,000 plutonium pits. At
present there are 12,000 pits that are stored in above ground earthen
bunkers that were used back in 1942 during the war times. They were
used to store conventional weapons, they were not ever intended to store
plutonium pits that have a half-life of 24,000 years," explains Doris.
Designated as a Superfund cleanup site by the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) in 1994 after years of contaminating the region, Pantex is
currently regulated by the federal Department of Energy (DOE), along
with statewide oversight by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation
Commission (TNRCC).(1)

Aquifer at Risk

The Pantex facility rests on 16, 000
acres(2) directly above the Ogallala
Aquifer, the primary source of water in the region. Local residents,
some of whom are located within a half-mile of the facility,(3) get their drinking water from wells which tap
into the Ogallala. The aquifer also supplies the City of Amarillo. Not
only is the Panhandle rich farm country, but large numbers of beef
cattle are raised there. "This 26-county area produces twenty-five
percent of the nation's" fed beef," explains Phil. "Iowa beef [a local
producer] is three miles from the Pantex site. The water they are using
comes directly from the Pantex site... Over 5,000 cows are processed
there each day," Doris adds.

The aquifer is
recharged, in part, by the many "playa lakes" in the region-playa lakes
are large, circular natural depressions where water collects and seeps
slowly down into the Ogallala Aquifer. For years, Pantex used the playa
lakes to collect contaminated runoff and hold waste discharges from the
plant. Pantex scientists claimed that the dense clay bottoms of the
playa lakes would act as an "impermeable" barrier and prevent
contamination from reaching the aquifer. Local residents, however,
observed the seasonal drying and deep cracking of the playa bottoms and
dismissed Pantex's "impermeable barrier" theory.(4)

Local skepticism over Pantex's activities was soon validated. In 1995 a
nearby farmer discovered traces of explosives in his well water.(5) And in 1997, an off-site monitoring well on
the same farmer's property showed high levels of heavy metals, including
lead, which greatly exceeded drinking water standards.(6) On the Pantex compound itself, groundwater
contamination is heavy-on the southeast side of the facility, explosives
and chromium contamination were discovered over a three square-mile area
that includes 1.5 billion gallons of groundwater.(7)

Frustrated with TNRCC's response to the contamination flowing off-site,
Phil wonders, "If the TNRCC is going just continue to dig wells on
Pantex rather than worry about the safety of the community" what are
they there for? Somebody needs to be doing a little stouter job than
their doing."

The Burning Grounds

"In order to decommission or take apart
the weapons it's necessary for them to use solvents such as
tricloroethylene or carbon tetracloride and several other chemicals, but
they also use a burning treatment and they open air burn some of the
materials in order to separate the materials". That burning ground is at
the point where the contamination has reached the Ogalalla aquifer,"
says Phil. Recently, groundwater contaminated with trichloroethylene
(TCE) was discovered in an Ogallala monitoring well located near the
"burning grounds" on the north side of the Pantex plant. During three
sample periods in May, August, and October, 1999, officials detected
levels of TCE near of above the EPA's drinking water standard for TCE (5
parts per billion).(83) TCE is an
industrial solvent used to degrease metal parts. Exposure to TCE
through ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact has been linked to liver
and kidney damage, immune system disorders, birth defects, and childhood
leukemia.(9)

The "burning grounds" cover approximately 58 acres in the Pantex
facility and the site is used to dispose of toxic chemicals such as TCE,
toluene, benzene, and acetone.(10) The
chemicals are dumped into unlined soil pits-3 feet deep and 20
square-feet in area-and set on fire or left to evaporate. Some
estimates indicate that prior to 1988, up to 350,000 gallons of TCE were
disposed of in these evaporation/burn pits. Direct seepage from the pit
to the aquifer and run-off from pit overflow most likely resulted in the
contamination found in the Ogallala monitoring well.(11)

Cover Up?

While local residents are worried about the
contamination, they are equally angered by the fact that the monitoring
information was withheld from the public-Pantex and the DOE did not
notify the public of the contamination until March 2000, a full nine
months after the discovery.(12) Pantex
officials blamed the delay on "miscommunication"; meanwhile, TNRCC
claimed that it too had not known about the contamination until the DOE
announcement. However, Pantex officials pointed out that TNRCC
inspectors had also tested samples from the well and had not publicly
notified local residents about the contamination.(13) It is not clear whether TNRCC simply failed
to detect increased levels of TCE in the water or knew about the
contamination and was not forthright with the knowledge it had. In
either case, the agency failed in its mission to protect the region's
primary water resource.

Immediately following the DOE announcement of TCE contamination in the
Ogallala, a coalition of public interest groups under the umbrella
organization Save Texas Agriculture and Resources (STAR) issued a media
advisory pointing out factual errors and misleading information in the
DOE news release. On March 6, 2000, three days after the DOE's
announcement, the STAR coalition issued another announcement citing
other instances of contamination by Pantex. According to STAR:

Pantex detected but failed to report the presence of methylene
chloride, another common solvent, in two samples collected from Ogallala
monitoring wells in October 1998. Methylene chloride was detected in
concentrations that exceeded the federal drinking water standard of 5
parts per billion.

In 1999 methylene chloride and acetone were each
detected four times in the aquifer, although at concentrations below
drinking water standards.

High explosives were detected in an
on-site well in May 1999 and at least a dozen times in off-site Ogallala
wells since 1995. Pantex officials did not disclose this information or
conduct follow-up tests.(14)

After the TCE reporting incident, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson
ordered an investigation by DOE to determine why the contamination was
not reported sooner. A draft report by the DOE determined that Pantex's
water monitoring methods are inadequate and that in this case, plant
officials failed to follow proper procedures for reporting groundwater
contamination.(15) Pantex responded with
a promise to add more groundwater monitoring wells and improve their
reporting procedures.(16)

Neighbors Suffer

Meanwhile, local residents continue to
experience health problems, as well as decreased property values, which
they attribute to toxic dumping by Pantex. A 1996 study by the US
Department of Health and the Texas Department of Health found higher
than normal cancer rates in the counties surrounding Pantex. Although
the report failed to link the high cancer rate to activities at Pantex,
local citizens believe otherwise. One resident keeps a map of the
nearby city of Panhandle with straight pins marking the cases of cancer
in the town between 1975 and 1994. For a town with a population of only
2,300, over 400 people have been stricken with some sort of
cancer.(17)

For its part, the TNRCC cited the DOE for contaminating the Ogallala and
for failing to notify the agency about it. However, to date no fines
have been imposed.(18) Meanwhile,
officials at Mason & Hanger, the engineering company that is paid up to
$300 million a year by the DOE to operate the Pantex facility, say they
are doing their best to clean up the site and comply with state
environmental regulations. As part of their efforts, they built a pump
to suck 150,000 gallons a day of contaminated water from the Ogallala,
run it through a filter, then inject it back into the aquifer.
Convinced of the effectiveness of this method, they plan to expand the
system and pump up to 450,000 gallons a day. However, even if their
filtering system works, at the expanded pace it would still take almost
a decade to clean all the contaminated water in the upper Ogallala. And
for the residents of Amarillo and nearby communities who rely on the
Ogallala for safe, clean drinking water, that just may be too little,
too late.

Join TexasPEER soon for another stop on the Texas Toxic Tour.

Sources:

Mavis
Belisle, "Meanwhile, back on the east side?" The Nuclear Examiner,
February-March-April, 2000, p. 12.